What's in a Name?
by ImogenDreams
Summary: There was no victory in her name because there wasn't any to be found. Teddy/Victoire - Their beginning.


A/N: **Note: I typed all this up late one night while I should have been sleeping. Why is it that ideas always come when you need to be doing something else? Anyway, I hoped you enjoyed this, as short as it was. I haven't explored or read much Victoire fanfiction and I really hope that this seems alright. I may turn this into a short story, a sort of moments of impact of their relationship from here where it first began to where it ends (if it ends). We shall see if inspiration hits I suppose. Thank you so much for reading, leave a review if you have something to say :P **

**All recognizable work belongs to JKR and I claim no ownership. Also, the title is derived from Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet _and Romeo's speech 'what's in a name that which we call a rose?' **

What's in a Name?

The summer was long and hot. Sweat trickled down the back of her neck as she spent another day looking out to the great big sea. Her blonde hair was sticking to her forehead like seaweed but she didn't bother wiping it away. Her clear blue eyes, which people said looked like a reflection of the summer sky, were glazed over with dreams of a better future.

She wasn't exactly sure why she was unhappy. Why her brow was constantly furrowed as if in constant thought or her lips were pinched together as if they had been made by the heavens that way. The only way she could explain it was that she was miserable. It's how she remembered those days long past where she spent more time making angels in the sand then being with the ones who loved her.

It was easier that way. To feel the uncommon English heat burn her pale skin till it was raw with blisters because it made her feel something. It made her breath in the salty humid air as if it was life's sustenance.

Her whole life she had been told certain things about herself. Visions of greatness. Visions of grandeur. Things that no sixteen year old could even imagine achieving and yet she knew they all expected something from her. Her name was a symbol and somehow that symbol had become her.

It choked her because she didn't know how to be that.

She was sick of it. Though at the time she didn't know that - she still wanted to be everything to everyone. She didn't understand the discrepancy between that ideal person and who she really was or who she saw herself as. She was still only one person and a rather pathetic one at that.

Her porcelain like eyes blinked into the sun her gaze never leaving the distant dark horizon. She couldn't help but wonder of the world across the ocean. If it held hope because she knew here, the English had none. They never believed they even deserved a future. Or maybe that was just her and only her. She wasn't sure. She couldn't always tell what she felt and what the rest of the world felt as well.

She was a child that came of the Second Wizarding War and somehow she knew that was the reason for her morose. That it had damaged her somehow- tainted everything about who she was because she was birthed in complete innocence in a world that still grieved.

Her childish cries hadn't been the loudest during those times.

The survivors of war were always louder, more demanding, more fearful. Nightmares that shoved her own fears away into the dark abyss.

There was no victory in her name because there wasn't any to be found. Somehow the cold hard truth came to them that people still died and no one could truly get over that.

She couldn't stop the nightmare's that plagued her mum or how her dad sometimes would stare out the window when he thought no one was looking, watching his life pass him by. It didn't stop them putting their hopes on their one child. The symbol that life went on.

Somehow it had to.

Somehow? The question was what plagued her. It sent her out to edges of the Cornish coast so often, leaving her beach house behind her. It was what brought her there that day.

She had kicked off her sandals and her feet were sinking slowly into the wet sand as the waves lapped up against her ankles. Drops of the salt water sprayed her clothes and face but it felt good, the sudden spark of cold against her burning skin.

She knew her uncle was coming by today and she'd even told her dad that she'd be there to say hello. She'd stop hiding, temporarily ignore the misery that told her if she wasn't there they'd stop seeing her as a triumph, expecting her mere existence to fix the wounds they tried to grow past. They'd get better.

The ocean seemed to whisper to her in its bubbling secrets. Crashing up against her legs and pulling back again; her feet sunk deeper in.

She always felt like she was sinking further and she had no idea why. Why couldn't she fix it, why there wasn't a way out or why she couldn't be what they needed her to be? She carried the weight of them all on her knobbly shoulders. Weight that she may learn later wasn't ever hers to carry.

"Hello Victoire," a voice said beside her. She stood for a moment, unwavering unmoving as the water splashed against her pale calves. Finally she turned and saw his blue hair. It was the thing she always remembered about him.

"They sent you to check up on me then?" she said, her voice almost lost in the humid air. She swallowed dust, and then she swallowed again. He flashed her a sort of smile and his hair turned to black. She always remembered that he could change. Somehow, it made her feel other things could too. Maybe.

"Maybe," he replied softly. She frowned briefly but Uncle Harry had probably been at the house for ages and she hadn't shown up. She couldn't truly be mad; she had promised she'd be there.

They stood in silence, the water soaked the bottom of his robes but he didn't seem to mind. He never seemed to really mind. He had been in their lives constantly, weaving into the Weasley family like the cold north wind. He was there, always moving, ever shifting. She liked that about him. The way he could adapt.

She looked over at him. Her eyes burned into him as he lightly looked into the waters like she had been doing only moments before. Searching, perhaps, for the answers she sought. Maybe he could answer them for her. He always seemed to be a bottomless pit of thoughts.

She would always remember him that way. The jet black hair that almost looked blue, the slow roll of his shoulders and how he stood in a way that made him seem like he was a king somewhere. A strange air of confidence rung through his body and she thought his job after Hogwarts was good for him. It helped him gain closure because he seemed different now. More complete. Perhaps searching for artefacts of the past really did help him piece his present together like a map once torn apart to only be sewn together by the threads of time.

Sometimes she would hold onto that thought – being sewn together as if the frays hadn't already happened. It seemed like a nice idea that life could so easily be fixed with a few stitches and for a long time she believed it to be true. Believed that you just needed to find the right thread.

He looked over at her and his eyes crinkled up in a half smile. She should have noted that he never fully grinned, it was only ever half there. He reached up and took a lock of her damp hair and rubbed it between his fingers softly. Like it was a jewel.

She smiled briefly, but only briefly before looking back out to the ocean. She glanced at him from the corner of her eyes, his hair was back to blue and it seemed to gleam in the sun and the half smile was still lingering on his face. There were times when she was with him she thought she could change too. Just like him.

That maybe, she could become more than her name more than the symbol she saw herself as. Maybe instead of just being victory, she could actually become the victor.

She thought perhaps, she had found the right thread.


End file.
